[dokuwiki] Re: dash or underscore as word seperator in url for search engine indexation
- From: "Todd Augsburger" <todd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:30:39 -0500
Yann,
It is correct that Google treats an underscore as a letter, not punctuation.
(I've not looked at other search engines.)
Now, I don't pretend to know all the internal details of Google's search
algorithms, but surely in real life this makes little difference unless the
_only_ occurrence of the search terms is in the page title. I just checked
Google with my own site, and searching for some obscure terms (occurring in
the title of one page and only the body of others) did _not_ return the
search-term-titled page first in the search results--instead some of the
body-only pages were at the top. Based on this limited test, I suspect that
you cannot really "improve [your] Google ranking" simply by changing the
page title. I'd worry more about who links to your pages, and what your page
content is. (Actually, I use config "first heading for pagenames"--the
separator is rarely visible to me. And in fact, the _majority_ of my pages
are the config's default "Start page name", because I heavily use multiple
namespaces.)
On the other hand, I _did_ modify the template that I use so that each page
has a "keywords" meta tag. Is there anything built into Dokuwiki which will
manage keywords? Or are they not as important as they used to be?
Todd Augsburger
todd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Roller Organs
www.rollerorgans.com
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Tux" <cactux@xxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 2:50 PM
To: <dokuwiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [dokuwiki] dash or underscore as word seperator in url for search
engine indexation
Hello,
After some search on this mailing list, I could not find any message
regarding the best choice in the use of dash "-" or underscore "_" as
word seperator in url for search engine indexation.
Why this question?
Because I made some search, and it seems that it is much better to use
the dash "-" than the underscore "_" to separate words.
So this first example will be better referenced by Google:
http://www.example.com/dokuwiki/discover-the-use-of-the-wiki-tool
Than this one:
http://www.example.com/dokuwiki/discover_the_use_of_the_wiki_tool
Here are some references regarding this subject:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
http://orderedlist.com/articles/an-underscore-solution
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/archive/index.php/t-6460.html
And more with this google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+dash+underscore
Personnaly, I prefer underscore to separate words, I find this more
readable.
However, I set up my Dokuwiki to dash separator in order to improve my
Google ranking (using the $conf['sepchar'] variable).
What are your thoughts on this subject?
Yann
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